Christiana Mall

 

(Photo: Visit Delaware)

It just keeps happening.

You can name all of the places. You can rattle off the sites, the names, the details. It doesn't matter.

You can offer the thoughts. The prayers. You can stomp your feet. You can accuse every person that you want of being complicit.

It doesn't matter.

It just keeps happening.

According to "sources" on the interwebs tonight, there was a shooting at Christiana Mall in Delaware today. WDEL.com and multiple others report that three people have been injured after shots were fired in the food court. Delaware State Police have confirmed the three injuries. 

So often, we read about the places and think how foreign it sounds. So distant.

You've never been there, right?

Sure, I've driven through Newtown and Sandy Hook many times before 2012. But I'd never been to Sandy Hook Elementary School. It felt foreign even though I know the town.

But sometimes we actually have been to the place in question.

And, with that, I've been past Christiana Mall multiple times. It's visible from I-95 at its exit with Delaware Route 1. I've passed it on my way to Florida and North Carolina and Baltimore and Aberdeen and Virginia and Washington.

And I've been in the mall as well. It's a nice place though I don't recall buying anything. I just took a walk around.

Oh, this brings me no joy at all. If anything, I suppose it brings the event a little closer.

But, even then, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing.

It's a coincidence. Nothing more.

And my words -- this post -- are every bit as useless as those who are in power who can try to do something about these shootings.

But I think about how Sean and I stayed in Newark -- next to Christiana -- last summer. We have occasionally gone for a walk around a local mall to check it out. Sometimes it leads us to grabbing a meal.

I know -- a complete hypothetical -- but that's where the mind can go when it hits closer to home.

Once again, I'm completely without words. Or I have them and simply don't feel like engaging in rhetoric.

Somehow this needs to stop.

People should be able to go walk around a mall and feel safe.

Kids should be able to go to school safely.

It would be nice to not live in fear.

What a world.